On a journey exploring paths through continuous learning

Working software vs points

I often come across people at management positions who clearly want to manage by tracking only numbers but fail to understand why were those metrics in place. We were part of a six team project, we were asked to go through our requirements and give an estimate including any proof of concepts and study that we had to do. The estimates were in points in fibonacci but were tightly mapped to number of days. When we questioned about why points to days the answer was to keep the yardstick of measurement same across all the teams in the org. It was setup for failure, but our team had to move on with the development so we went ahead agreeing to the terms.

After the first sprint our team had missed meeting the estimate while all the other teams had achieved it, we were met by one of the senior managers who gave a stern warning to the team that points are non negotiable and wants us not to fail again. When the time for demo came by, we were the only team that did a demo of the working software and product owners were able to immediately grasp what was going on and gave feedback on it. All the other teams had met their estimated points but they did things like ‘Study ABC tool’, ‘Setup CI machine’, ‘Setup Dev machine’ and so on.

Our team did all those and also demoed a working software, the other teams have bloated the estimate and bought time. This went on for some iterations, all the other teams were able to meet the estimates but other than our team all the other teams were not able to showcase their working software. The management did not care much about working software, their success was measured by meeting the points; it was the product owners who suffered the most as it took an extremely long time for them to get something working.

When you choose to measure something people will optimise for the metrics. Velocity and points are a way to help plan and size the software so that people can be allocated and releases can be planned, when it turned out to be a yardstick then there is only movement but no progress. People will eventually game the system and it becomes a toxic cycle.